my cd-rom and dvd drives suddenly stopped working. They are not shown in My Computer. I tried downloading
Win XP Fixes: Restore CD/DVD Drives to Explore
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/scripts_d..._cd_dvd_fix.ht

and rebooting but this didn't make any differece
Not sure what to try nex

Go into the device manager and see if it shows up there and if it has any symbols like a yellow triangle beside it. You can try to uninstall it here and then let windows detect it by shutting your OS down and then restarting. For device manager go>start\right click "My Computer" then click the properties then the hardware tab-device manager button. Good luck.